A little self-promotion never hurt anyone. Especially creative types. Austin Kleon, a self-described “writer who draws,” tells us how to market ourselves at parties, and on the Internet.  

When you finish a marathon without ever starting it, there's a problem. Guru Madhavan tells us how a particularly creative cheater exposed some serious design flaws, eventually changing the way we run marathons. 

Ingvar Kamprad is infamous for his thriftiness. Well, that and a little company he started called IKEA. But Kamprad’s obsessive money-saving tendencies (he still plans his supermarket trips around weekly sales) helped him redesign the way the world thinks about buying, and selling, furniture. 

Storytelling is a two-way street. Drew Davidson, director of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon, thinks that interactive media, and particularly gaming, is a groundbreaking way to reinvent how we relate to stories and make them our own.  

From cowboy coffee to pumpkin spice lattes, our love for coffee might just lie in our genes. Marilyn Cornelis, a nutrition scientist at Northwestern University, thinks that it’s not your tastebuds but your DNA that determines the amount of coffee you drink.